State Of The Map is the international annual conference of the OpenStreetMap foundation. There’s a lot of excitement about stateofthemap.us taking place in San Francisico in just over a week’s time. This is shaping up very nicely, and registration is still open. It is organised by OpenStreetMap U.S., and is followed by SOTM Baltics in August. Various other local chapters are running their own local conferences. ….but the main event….

State Of The Map is taking place in Birmingham, England. 6-8th September. A few months away, but book early to avoid disappointment (and save a bit of money). Register now!

There’s also an upcoming deadline for the call for presentations. A great opportunity to reach out to the OpenStreetMap community. Get your presentation ideas submitted there. We’d love to hear from you.

We kicked off a new donation drive a couple of weeks ago (at the same time as bringing you the new iD editor). We have a £40,000 target for some specific hardware upgrades, and since then we’ve seen tremendous support and good will directed at OpenStreetMap from people all over the world as the donations come in, bringing us up to 23% of the target at time of writing.

We’ve just received our first large donation from Lokku, pushing us forwards to the tune of £2500 . Thank you Lokku!

Perhaps this will be the first of many larger donations from supporting companies. We’re very grateful to Lokku for kicking things off, and for all their support over the years. Lokku are the people behind Nestoria, #geomob london, and also (coming soon) OpenCage Data. You can catch up with them at the U.S. conference SOTM US, and OSMPlus.

There is additional information on the wiki about our plans for these funds, but essentially with the money raised, we’ll be making some new hardware purchases which are important and necessary to keep things running smoothly as we continue to see astounding growth of our community. More mappers contributing, and more end users seeing our maps.

The Geospatial World Leadership Awards Jury has conferred the OSM Foundation with the “Geospatial Content Organisation of the Year 2012” award. This award on earlier occasions has been presented to both Google Earth and Bing Maps and is given out by Geospatial Media based on nominations by the Geospatial World Magazine.

According to their statement, the jury “was convinced and felt overwhelmed with vision and capabilities of the Foundation in developing, maintaining and making available, the voluminous, exhaustive and constantly updated geospatial data.”

The award was received by Henk Hoff, board member, on behalf of the OSMF, during the Award Night of the Geospatial World Forum. Henk thanked the organisation for the award and with that recognizing the project as a reliable source for global open geo-data. He continued with: “The real success behind OpenStreetMap is it’s community. A community of more than a million volunteer contributors around the world. I would like to dedicate this award to them.”

The Planet.osm website by bbbike.org has been updated. You can export OSM data in a variety of data formats (e.g. Garmin OSM or ESRI’s shapefile) for your individual area of interest. They also published a free of charge iPhone Bike app.

A new version of RTKLIB, an open-source software package that allows accurate positioning, was released on April 29th. You can find more information in the OSM wiki.

OpenStreetMap, the user-created map used by many of the biggest sites on the web, has today unveiled an entirely new editor that makes it easier to contribute than ever before.

The new editor, codenamed ‘iD’, boasts an intuitive interface and clear walk-throughs that make editing much easier for new mappers. By lowering the barrier to contributions, we believe that more people can contribute their local knowledge to the map – the crucial factor that sets OSM apart from closed-source commercial maps.

To accompany the expected growth in OSM’s contributor base, the OpenStreetMap Foundation is launching an appeal to fund new hardware for the project. The appeal aims to make the editing experience more resilient, so that the OSM community can continue producing the most extensive and up-to-date map of the world.

“OpenStreetMap’s growth in the past two years has been phenomenal,” explained Simon Poole, chairman of the OSM Foundation. “We’ve seen an explosion in the amount of local knowledge our mappers contribute to the map. This has encouraged more and more big-name websites and apps to switch to OpenStreetMap, while also enabling map hackers and geo enthusiasts the world over to build startling, imaginative visualisations from our open data.”

“Now, with the new editor and our plans for new hardware, we’re stepping up another level to make OpenStreetMap, not Google, the default choice for mapping and map data.”

The new editor

The new iD editor is a pure HTML5 experience, using the cutting-edge D3 visualisation library. Behind the clear design and intuitive interface is a sophisticated back-end that automatically recommends the most popular ‘tagging’ conventions used by the OSM community.

Development began as a community project in July 2012, and has since been taken forward thanks to a $575,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, with development being co-ordinated by MapBox – one of several companies which offer commercial services on OpenStreetMap’s open data.

From later today, new OpenStreetMap users with a modern browser will automatically use the new iD editor. Users can switch between this and the existing Flash-based Potlatch 2 editor (which is being refocused as a tool for intermediate users) using their settings page or the drop-down ‘Edit’ menu. Advanced desktop-based editors are also available.

The editor software is entirely open source, with code available on github under an ultra-permissive licence.

The funding drive

The funding appeal will pay for additional server infrastructure at the heart of OpenStreetMap – where the geographic data and edits are stored – and other key hardware upgrades to improve reliability and performance.

The new server will greatly increase the reliability and performance of OSM’s website and editing service, such that the editing database continues to be available even if one server fails, and providing a more responsive experience when users upload their changes to the map.

OpenStreetMap’s volunteer-led operations team has put a lot of work into designing the new server for maximum performance. Together, these investments will lay the foundation for the continuing growth of OpenStreetMap over the years to come.